While united by their adherence to a broad
philosophical program, these Cartesians did not
constitute an organized group but worked independently
to further what they saw as the right and
progressive philosophy. By far the most important
Cartesian of the seventeenth century, however, was
a French Oratorian named Nicolas Malebranche
(1638–1715). A bolder and more systematic
thinker than the others, Malebranche was not afraid
to modify and even depart from Descartes’s ideas in
highly unorthodox ways. His occasionalism was
thoroughgoing: God is the only real causal agent in
the universe. All finite things are created and sustained
in being by God, and all events, whether
mental or physical, are brought about by the divine
will. Creatures and their states are only secondary
causes, or ‘‘occasions,’’ for God to exercise genuine
power. Malebranche also argued that the clear and
distinct ideas that serve as the objects of human
intellectual understanding are not modes or properties
of the human mind but rather ideal archetypes
in the divine understanding. With his theory of the
Vision in God Malebranche sought to make human
beings as dependent upon God for their knowledge
as all creatures are dependent upon God for their
being and activity. His doctrines were attacked by
other Cartesians, most notably the Jansenist firebrand
Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), who
thought Malebranche’s ideas represented not only
an unacceptable departure from the true principles
of Descartes’s philosophy, but also a serious threat
to Christian faith.
By the third quarter of the century, Cartesianism,
while vigorously condemned by leading religious
and political authorities (in 1667 the French
court prohibited a public funeral oration from being
delivered at the ceremony for the reburial of his
remains in Paris), enjoyed immense success. Nonetheless,
it suffered from serious internal weaknesses
and obvious explanatory failures. The advent of
Newtonianism at the end of the century, with its
alternative conception of scientific understanding,
powerful mathematical presentation, and explicit
critique of Cartesianism, brought about the final
downfall of this formidable scientific paradigm.
See also Aristotelianism; Descartes, Rene´; Scholasticism.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late
Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1996.
Garber, Daniel. Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics. Chicago,
1992.
Nadler, Steven M., ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Malebranche. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2000.
Schmaltz, Tad M. Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception
of Descartes. Cambridge, U.K., and New York,
2002.
Watson, Richard A. The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1987.
STEVEN NADLER
CARTOGRAPHY AND GEOGRAPHY.
The recovery and diffusion of ancient literary
and mathematical writings on geography in fifteenth-century
Europe gradually transformed cartographic
practices in the later fifteenth century.
Earlier models of ordering space lacked uniform
standards of denoting terrestrial continuity in mathematically
consistent terms—nautical portolan
charts noted distance and direction on magnetic
compass lines for sea travel, itineraries measured
paths of land travel, zonal maps divided the globe,
while symbolic mappae mundi situated Asia, Africa,
and Europe in a circle centered, for theological
reasons, at Jerusalem. Renaissance geographic
maps, by contrast, plotted the inhabited world as an
interrelated network of secular space, translating the
spherical globe onto a measured and ordered twodimensional
surface of fixed directions and proportions,
as devised by the second-century Greek geographer
Ptolemy, to frame a geometrically continuous
representation of space.
Ptolemy’s system of terrestrial coordinates,
which appeared in fifteenth-century world maps,
continued to be used to denote position and directions
even after inaccuracies in Ptolemy’s own projections
were corrected. Maps made for manuscripts
of Ptolemy’s Guide to Geography in the century after
its translation in 1406 challenged the existence of
unnavigable ‘‘torrid zones’’ as well as Aristotelian
concentric spheres of elements (water, air, fire),
positing instead a network of global relations by
transferring the earth’s surface to a graticule that
divided the surface of the earth according to metric
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indices. The large circular world map that the Venetian
monk Fra Mauro designed for King Afonso V
of Portugal in 1459 had combined fifteenth-century
navigators’ accounts of the coast of Africa and the
Indian Ocean with Marco Polo’s (1254–1324) ethnographic
accounts without using metric indices,
pictorially illustrating the wealth of the Far East and
showing its potentates and exotic fauna. Fifteenthcentury
geographic maps defined space within a directional
grid, and their depiction of a terraqueous
globe with east-west parallels of latitude and northsouth
meridians of longitude may have led Christopher
Columbus to contest the Aristotelian model of
the earth before Spanish royal cosmographers, natural
philosophers who specialized in the relation of
cosmic and terrestrial spheres and based their claims
on celestial observations, in 1483–1484. The fact
that Ptolemy reduced the earth’s circumference
probably encouraged Columbus’s plans to ‘‘sail the
parallel’’ to cross the Atlantic in 1492.
Map projections situated place-names in an abstract
grid, creating a record of space that could be
easily modified in the face of new discoveries.
Printed maps emphasized a geometric organization
of the world’s surface from 1477 to later maps that
included national boundaries (1482), and to the
modernized Ptolemaic projections (beginning in
1513) showing the Americas as an independent
landmass. Geographic knowledge expanded as Europeans
became more familiar with routes beyond
the Mediterranean world. Maps were seen as increasingly
authoritative and thus could serve to clarify
questions of territorial jurisdiction as European
powers began to expand overseas. For instance, a
Portuguese planisphere showing the African coasts
and the Indian Ocean (1502) marked the meridian—960
nautical miles west of Ptolemy’s prime
meridian at the Canary Islands—by which the Spanish
and Portuguese divided the New World at the
1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. (In Ptolemaic maps the
Indian Ocean had been depicted as landlocked.)
Spanish cosmographers helped resolve the disputes
that arose over Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519–1521
voyage, due to the limited accuracy of determining
position by compass bearings.
Maps also reflected political agendas and cultural
attitudes. For example, the French royal mathematician
Oronce Fine devised a cordiform (heartshaped)
projection on a central meridian around
1536 in order to foreground France’s proximity to
the New World. His projection inspired Gerardus
Mercator to map the post-Ptolemaic world on parallel
meridians ‘‘properly adapted for use in navigation’’
in 1569, allowing sailors to plot nautical direction
along fixed latitudes. While not immediately
adopted by navigators—Pedro Nun˜es’s Defense of
the Sea chart (1537) counseled the use of hydrographic
charts instead—Mercator’s projection increased
the apparent size of Europe and placed it at
the center of a global network, thus symbolically
expressing European preeminence in the world.
Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit missionary to China,
had to confront the Mercator map’s bias when he
redesigned it in 1584–1602 for a Chinese audience;
to please his hosts, he moved China to the map’s
center.
The use of projections to correlate terrestrial
positions served as a framework to mediate new
understandings of geography and encouraged the
exchange of geographic information. While navigational
charts long struggled to map the earth’s
spherical form onto a two-dimensional surface, new
techniques of projection encouraged the growth of
descriptive geography. The mathematician Gemma
Frisius explained the construction of surveying techniques
by means of triangulation in 1533, facilitating
the integration of regional maps into continuous
projections by means of land surveying. The
expanding use of triangulated surveys—which
served to define boundaries, lines of property, and
military fortifications—together with terrestrial
projections encouraged the development of techniques
of descriptive geography. Detailed qualitative
maps of cities and regions, known as chorographic
maps, were gathered in over forty-three
editions of Sebastian Mu¨nster’s Cosmographia
(1544). Although the rise of triangulation is usually
interpreted as the origin of objective and nonpictorial
cartography, maps continued to depict topography,
costumes, and other cultural features. In the
1570s printers in Amsterdam and Antwerp compiled
atlases of considerable elegance, assembling
world, regional, and city maps of both the Old and
New Worlds.
Despite their claims of detachment from social
contexts, maps of the New World reflected political,
economic, and ideological interests. J. B. Harley has
called attention to how maps serve different rhetoC
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Cartography and Geography. This unusual circular map of the area around the city of Nuremberg, dated
1492, is from a copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum, a pictorial history of the world. The text
accompanying the map indicates that it covers a radius of sixteen miles from the center at Nuremberg and
that it can be used as a distance indicator to the various surrounding towns by the use of the scale at the
bottom. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
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rical ends, by encoding relations of power, concealing
information for political or economic reasons,
and using allegorical decoration to further
hidden agendas. For example, blank spaces in early
maps of the Americas presented those territories as
open to European conquest. Harley’s arguments
have stimulated scholarly work on the use of maps
to assert claims of national identity in England and
the Netherlands and to stake imperial claims in the
New World. As Spain’s overseas empire expanded,
for example, a variety of maps served to demarcate
boundaries of colonial jurisdiction and inscribe the
relations of colonizer and colonized. Chorographies
played a prominent role in images of frontiers, administrative
maps, and military charts in both the
Mediterranean and New World. The Relaciones Geogra´ficas
were commissioned by Philip II to map
communities in the New World. The descriptive
geographies of the Americas by Mu¨nster, Theodore
de Bry (1590), and Jean de Le´ry (1578) glorified
European conquest and helped foster a sense of
European dominance, which was appealing to Europe’s
ruling classes.
From the late sixteenth century, mathematical
geography included nautical charting. Geography
became institutionalized as a tool for navigation and
trade at the same time that the mastery of sea routes
became a basis for staking national claims. This convergence
of technological and political developments
demonstrated the pragmatic uses of mapping
the globe and thus encouraged wide interest in
geography, while also promoting the acceptance of
the Mercator projection despite its limited adoption
by sailors. Martin Frobisher’s search for the Northwest
Passage in 1576–1578, Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of
the English Nation (1589; revised 1598–1600), and
Edward Wright’s (1561–1615) correction for magnetic
variations in the North Sea all synthesized
geography with navigation to promote England’s
imperial aspirations. Sir Walter Raleigh’s use of explicitly
commercial arguments in his 1596 protocol
on the colonization of Guyana cemented the ties
between geography and commerce. In response to
competition from the Portuguese and the Spanish,
state-owned concerns such as the Dutch East India
Company (from 1602), the Dutch West India
Company (founded 1621), and the Hudson Bay
Company (1670) protected their maps as economic
and state secrets.
Yet since most maps were confined to coastal
areas, and until 1700 considerable interest was directed
to mapping navigational routes, much inland
territory of the world remained unmapped. There
was continued reliance on nautical charting and
neglect of inland areas in much of North and South
America, driven largely by interest in locating El
Dorado or the Northwest Passage. Around 1560–
1580, long after Magellan sailed through the tip of
South America, the limits of nautical cartography in
the Pacific led cartographers to posit a southern
‘‘Terra Australis,’’ in order to balance landmasses
on the globe; this cartographical fiction only disappeared
from maps around 1775, with the voyages of
Captain Cook. Inaccuracies in mapping the size of
the Pacific continued into the mid-eighteenth century,
although global standards of longitude were
widely accepted by 1650. Although world maps had
described Africa from ancient times, Abraham
Ortelius’s 1573 map showing the mythical kingdom
of Prester John continued to be reprinted for two
centuries, and the interior of Africa was not mapped
until the late eighteenth century. Similarly, classical
constructions like the ends of the earth, or Antipodes,
remained in the early modern geographical
imagination even as more and more of the world’s
surface was mapped. The expansion of ethnographic
geography, meanwhile, was stimulated by the
travels of Jesuit missionaries among the American
Indians (1637–1673) as well as collections of missionaries’
maps of China in Description de l’Empire
de Chine (1735) and Histoire ge´ne´rale du Chine
(1777–1785; translated 1788).
The rise of geography as a mode of assembling
facts stimulated increased scrutiny of the sources of
geographical knowledge and of the expressive use
of cartographic conventions, which helped to redefine
cartography as an exact science. The emphasis
on the accurate determination of longitude in
large-scale eighteenth-century maps exemplified
geography’s increasingly descriptive function of
measuring the earth according to fixed standards.
The Bolognese astronomer Gian Domenico
Cassini was summoned to Paris to found the observatory
in 1669 for Louis XIV by Jean-Baptiste
Colbert; there he determined the Paris meridian as
a basis for the first large-scale general map of the
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Cartography and Geography. Bernardus Sylvanus included two world maps in his 1511 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, one
of them this unusual cordiform or heart-shaped map in which he tried to incorporate knowledge from the new discoveries of the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It shows the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Hispaniola as well as the coast of South
America and, in the North Atlantic, an island labeled ‘‘Terra Laboratorus,’’ possibly Newfoundland. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING
MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY
nation. His successors provided similar large-scale
topographic maps for political, military, and practical
purposes. Official French maps inspired Peter
the Great to plan the first map of the Russian
empire in 1715, and in 1726 he commissioned
French surveyors to map the country. In 1714 the
British government, seeking a new tool to bolster
its control of the seas, established a prize for the
accurate determination of longitude at sea. The
problem was finally solved in 1773.
Maps and atlases illustrated and organized
power relations both in the home country and in its
overseas imperial possessions while reflecting the increased
precision of instruments. Atlases commissioned
by gentry and nobility in eighteenth-century
England defined rigid hierarchies of land ownership
up to the 1791 completion of the Ordnance Survey,
the first comprehensive synthesis of the nation undertaken
for military ends. London became a
‘‘clearinghouse’’ for maps of Britain’s imperial system.
The first extensive survey of Bengal on a
graticule of meridians and parallels by the surveyorgeneral
James Rennell in 1765–1771 stressed political
geography, reflecting the competition between
French and British interests vying to control the
lands of the Mughal empire; his map of India of
1788 illustrated the limits of British dominion and
defined the subcontinent as a coherent geographic
entity for the first time. In the course of the French
invasion of 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte undertook a
survey of Egypt based on the Paris meridian, in his
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Cartography and Geography. Sebastian Mu¨ nsters’s map of Europe, oriented with south at the top, is one of twenty-one
‘‘modern’’ maps he included in his 1540 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia. MAP COLLECTION, STERLING MEMORIAL LIBRARY, YALE
UNIVERSITY
desire to gain territorial compensation for France’s
loss of overseas colonies.
Given the authority invested in maps, cartographic
conventions and iconography provided states
with the means to stake territorial claims and visually
express national identity. The prestige of geography
as a natural science led Charles-Louis de Secondat
de Montesquieu (1689–1755) to classify
Europe, Asia, and Africa as continents—a term foreign
to ancient geographic writing—in order to
explain their cultural differences. The discrepancies
in cartographic standards, however, remained striking,
given the increased accuracy and detail in maps
and atlases that disseminated geographical knowledge
to ever wider audiences. Whether geographic
maps functioned to register spatial locations or to
depict objects of prestige, by 1800 they offered
important tools for organizing and transmitting information
within European empires and nation-
states.
See also Colonialism; Europe and the World; Exploration;
Islands; Shipbuilding and Navigation; Travel and
Travel Literature.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic
European Travel Writing, 400–1600. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1988.
Cormack, Lesley B. Charting an Empire: Geography at the
English Universities, 1580–1620. Chicago, 1997.
Cosgrove, Denis, ed. Mappings. London, 1999.
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